Aero City

Today, with the rise of the Internet as a platform for independent thinkers, we can learn a great deal about the historical relevance of Khidekel’s visionary projects. “Long before Friedman’s Architecture Mobile, Constant’s New Babylon, and Isozaki’s Clusters in the Air”, writes one source, “Khidekel imagined a world of horizontal skyscrapers that through their Suprematist weightless dynamism seemed to float ad infinitum across the surface of the earth.” The article continues: “Like a Nietzschean visionary clearly ahead of his time, Khidekel not only announced the advent of the suspended cities that would later become the tour de force of the avant-garde in the sixties but he, like Malevich in art, reached a level of abstraction that goes beyond a specific historical period, developing on its way a regenerating form of architectural avant-garde that always looks to the future and that even today – eighty years later – remains revolutionary.” The authors distinguish between revolutionary architecture and “architecture of revolution,” Constructivism, which “responds to the iconoclastic demands of the moment and creates a profusion of icons that portray a specific historical period,” inevitably becoming obsolete. On the contrary, Suprematist “revolutionary architecture always looks towards the future, remaining refreshingly contemporary.” For another critic, “Khidekel’s vision still manage to look futuristic, arguably more so than most of the Metabolists or Situationist projects that today feel retro-futurist, inextricably tied to the past. Khidekel’s work remains endlessly floating towards the future.”

Khidekel’s legacy would never have been resurrected without the pioneering work of Khan-Magomedov, whose scholarly integrity and absence of any political or commercial vested interests made him unique. He did what he deeply believed. This is what makes especially meaningful his inclusion of ten of Khidekel’s designs in his 2005 book “Sto shedevrov sovetskogo architekturnogo avangarda” (100 Masterpieces of Soviet Avant-Garde Architecture). It is important to note that publications about Khidekel, including a monographic study by Khan-Magomedov, were solely focused on Khidekel’s early experimental works of the 1920s. Like many scholars in the 1970s, Khan-Magomedov was interested only in experimental works, firmly refusing to consider anything created later than 1932, which was widely considered the endpoint of the Soviet avant-garde.